Traditional alarm or security systems need to be manually activated or “armed” by a user in order for the system to trigger an alarm; correspondingly, the system needs to be manually “disarmed” by a user to deactivate the system to prevent a false alarm upon return. The system requires manual intervention to be effective. When not armed, the system will, at best, provide audible notification of a sensor trigger (e.g., beeping if a door is opened), and may provide ‘panic’ button connectivity to the call center. The manual arming and disarming of the system is onerous to many users, resulting in infrequent use or abandonment of the system altogether. When armed, the system blindly sends an alarm if a sensor is triggered without disarming within a prerequisite time. There is no determination of reasonableness (e.g., as when an alarm is triggered when an internal motion sensor is activated; however, none of the exterior windows or doors were opened), which lead to many false alarms. Even with smart home security monitoring and alert systems, there is still the notion of the system needing to be armed or disarmed; that is, the system must be actively armed to provide security.
New advances in the field have shifted the burden of arming and disarming from a manual operation to an automated one, owing to techniques such as monitoring of wireless sensor inputs, for example, geographical location (geolocation) of mobile devices through Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) data, or detection of pre-paired wireless signals between on-person mobile devices and a security system's threshold monitoring device (e.g., wall-mounted security panel). However, the system must still be ‘armed’ to provide any security intrusion value, whether the arming is automated, manual, or a combination of the two. Furthermore, such systems are limited to monitoring and taking action based on an alarm or security event. What is needed is a monitoring and control system that monitors and takes action based on an event, whether an alarm or security event or otherwise, and that considers additional factors, input, and outputs, besides a sensed event, in taking appropriate action.